Biography

Carole Lombard (born Jane Alice Peters; October 6, 1908 – January 16, 1942) was an American film actress. She was particularly noted for her highly neurotic, energetic and often off-beat roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. She was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s.

I had spent years trying to sort out the circumstances leading up the crash of Flight 3—circumstances that should have been sortable and explainable but read like Fiction 101. The crash of Flight 3 and the reasons why Carole Lombard died on the plane with 21 others fit perfectly with Updike’s subatomic realm because the more we apply the rules of man’s physical world, the less the story makes sense. Last weekend in Fort Wayne, for example, I spent roughly 45 minutes talking about what a wonderful person Carole Lombard was, how down to earth, empathetic, generous, and considerate. Then I was asked, “If she knew her mother was terrified to fly and the PR man had dreamt his own death on an airplane, why did Lombard force them to get on the plane?” It’s an excellent question—I complimented the woman who asked it. Then I gave her a palms-up shrug and said, “I have no idea.” In Fireball I call it the fatal flaw, Carole’s charge ahead at full speed manner of living life, and it’s the only answer I can provide. There were times when she let nothing stand in her way, including reason. Yet her actions on January 16, 1942, which shattered the emotions of her traveling companions and then shattered their bodies, don’t sound like Carole Lombard at all. They just don’t.

If it wasn’t weird enough that Carole turned a deaf ear to Petey and Wink; if it wasn’t weird enough that TWA’s most experienced pilot, the one who had trained bomber crews on how to fight a war, suddenly behaved like a rookie flyer and steered his plane right into a mountain on a clear night; if it wasn’t weird enough that Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti had been scheduled to fly on a DC-3 that crashed in 1940 and a DC-3 that crashed in 1942 and survived both—if all these things weren’t weird enough, I have learned of two more truly astonishing Flight 3-related incidents since Fireball went to press a year ago. Both easily qualify for the Updike Dimension, and then some.

As I mentioned to a reporter in Fort Wayne, I have now finally accessed the FBI files on the plane crash and, I kid you not, UFOs were seen in the Flight 3 airway on nights leading up to January 16. No, seriously, UFOs. Many people logically dismiss UFOs as Cold War paranoia, but we’re talking sightings of odd lights in the sky before the era of Roswell and the “flying saucer” by eyewitnesses that include a Civil Aeronautics Authority man. A fed. A trained observer equivalent to today’s FAA investigators who saw spherical lights in the sky that were not aircraft. (For the record, I don’t believe that UFOs had anything to do with the crash of TWA Flight 3. I am remarking on how bizarre it is to find UFOs in the official FBI investigation.) Then there’s the other incident that I’m still working on that’s no less odd. Neither solves the mystery of Flight 3. On the contrary, both make answers all the more elusive and demonstrate how sometimes evidence and logic go right out the window, and, suddenly, you’re in that other dimension where people are dead and nobody can figure out how they got that way.

From the beginning, crazy things have surrounded the project that became Fireball. In October 2012 when I climbed the killer mountain to the site of the crash of TWA Flight 3, which had occurred more than 70 years earlier, I wasn’t prepared for the experience of the people who had died there whispering to me. I had climbed 4,000 feet pretty much straight up to see the spot where Carole Lombard met her fate and to examine the wreckage of the plane still on the mountainside. The last thing I expected was for the others to make their presence known; don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to say that I heard voices, but I felt the people around me, including in my ears, and when I held a human bone in my hand that day I wasn’t creeped out, because I understood what it was: communication. There were twenty-two souls aboard Flight 3 when she hit that Nevada cliff at 180 miles per hour after dark on January 16, 1942—a flight crew of three, four civilians, and fifteen Army personnel.

Born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In 1914, parents separated in which her mother took her and her brothers and moved to Los Angeles. Grew up as “a free-spirited tomboy” who participated in sports like tennis, volleyball, and swimming as well as won athletic prizes. Discovered by director Allan Dwan while she was playing baseball with her friends. Made her first film in 1921. Married twice with her husbands being William Powell and Clark Gable. In 1927, she was involved in a car accident that left a scar on her face. Died in a plane crash on Mount Potosi, Nevada while returning from a WWII War Bond Tour at 33.

Extract: Carole Lombard was in a hurry to get home. For days the movies' best screwball comedienne had been traveling crosscountry patriotically, plugging defense bonds. In Indianapolis she had lent a hand at flag-raisings, jampacked the city's big Cadle Tabernacle for a rally, where she led The Star-Spangled Banner. The blonde actress—who had often said she was glad she was not beautiful—in one day raised $2,000,000. Indianapolis called her Defense Bond Saleslady No. 1. Said plain-spoken Miss Lombard: "I'm like the barker at a carnival."

Earthfiles investigative reporter, Linda Moulton Howe, described a mysterious spate of aircraft incidents in the U.S. throughout the 1940s, and in particular, a famous crash in which actress Carole Lombard lost her life on the night of January 17th, 1942. Researcher Paul Blakesmith has uncovered previously unreleased files relating to the incident and revealed that there was a UFO sighted in the vicinity of the aircraft when it began to lose control and power and veered off course. A local witness said he saw a yellowish light in the area and that Lombard’s aircraft seemed to be experiencing engine and electrical problems before it impacted the granite face of a mountain about 25 miles southwest of Las Vegas. Some of the records and reports on this crash are still sealed and have not been released even 75 years after the fact. Based on her research, Linda speculated that the US government had a something like a "shoot down order" policy on UFOs until too many of our aircraft crashed as the result of some sort of retaliation by ETs and the policy was discontinued in the early 1950s.